We will soon know more about the present, too. Historic Royal Palaces are leading a review that may make it clearer than ever before how former and current royal residences are linked to the slave trade. Kensington Palace, Prince William and Kate Middleton’s London residence, will be reviewed. As will Hampton Court Palace, which is owned by Her Majesty. My upcoming book, The Queen’s Silence (published by Mariner and Mudlark), will join these ongoing investigations and make the Royal Family’s links to the slave trade and colonial slavery explicit. Still standing today at 42 Miller Street lies the former home of a major tobacco importer, Robert Findlay. Reputedly, The Tontine Hotel was the first in the city and was named "The Hottle" by Glaswegians at the time.

George III wrote an essay as a teenager arguing that slavery had no moral basis. Photograph: Prisma Archivo/Alamy George III ( 1760-1820 ) a b Garrett Mattingly, The Defeat of the Spanish Armada (London: The Reprint Society, 1961), p. 190. We are doing this work of our own volition to better understand where our funding came from and to see if our predecessor bodies had links to or received profits from the historic transatlantic slave trade. That research is under way.”The strong performance had enabled the commissioners to increase their financial support to C of E dioceses, cathedrals and churches during the Covid pandemic, the report said. As a society, Britain is having a difficult national conversation about its imperial past. Statues of slave owners are being torn down and attempts to decolonise the curriculum are gathering pace. Queen Anne dramatically expanded the UK’s slave-trading activities. Photograph: Ian Dagnall/Alamy Queen Anne ( 1702-1714 )

As there was almost nothing done to ensure that the Acts were obeyed, slave traders continued their activities, as did the shipbuilders. Information about this was sent to Parliament by the abolitionists, some of the captains in the Anti-Slavery Squadrons and British consular officials in slave-worked Cuba and Brazil. Investigations were held, more Acts were passed, but all to no avail, as no means of enforcement was put in place in Britain. All the government did was to set up the Anti-Slavery Squadron – at first comprised of old, semi-derelict naval vessels, unfit for the coastal conditions. To enable them to stop slavers of other nationalities, Britain entered into treaties with other slaving countries. But these were also ignored. The slave trade continued, unabated. Pictured behind them are slaves loading tobacco into barrels while one shelters a merchant with an umbrella.That compulsory silence extends to the archive of slavery. Although archives are full of stories, the voices they preserve are limited, fragmentary and far from neutral. They are, in most cases, the voices of enslavers, who continue to impart their outlook and version of events to future readers. “In history,” the Haitian scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot observed, “power begins at the source.” They were designed to inform and entertain in equal measures while representing that the city sold tobacco.